"I keep thinking about how I was "pre-trauma", and how I am today. I keep telling myself to "knock this crap off. Get with it. People have gone through so much more than you have. You don't deserve to feel this way. You were so much stronger before it happened. What happened to that girl?"" quote ImperfectMe

This is pretty much what everyone with PTSD struggles with. You have to get to the point where you learn to stop beating yourself up and allowing yourself to "feed into the anger and frustration" that comes from the fact that "you suffer from PTSD and you now have to spend time and have lots of patience with yourself so you can "slowly heal".

What you had before was just the ability to be able to go along thinking that "bad things happen to other people and "not you". You developed your own unique way that gave you a sense of "control" and maybe it was not as healthy as you thought.
And now that you have faced a situation that profoundly affected your overall sense of "control over your life", you are not really sure "how to proceed" and you are "more aware on every level then you have ever been before".

It is important to remember that we are designed to become much more "aware" when we experience something that "threatens our sense of safety and control".
As time passes and we gain more knowledge and experience with life, we also can get to a point where we begin to have a greater sense of overall "awareness" as well.

It is important to allow yourself to "slowly" take the time to understand that anything from your past that presented some kind of "loss of control" will come forward in waves and you have to be "patient" when that happens until you understand what this "wave of confusion really means" so you can finally resolve it.

For myself, I have finally realized that I am never going to be the person that I used to be before I developed PTSD. I had picked up some coping skills along the way where I was "not managing" the challenges around me as well as I had thought.
However, considering the actual challenges, I did manage to survive a lot and whatever defense mechanisms I had developed were not so bad considering the various challenges put in front of me.

The "gain on PTSD" begins to "slowly" and I emphasize "slowly" come as you have taken the time to do some sorting and be able to look at the wide view of who you are and what you have developed as "coping mechanisms' along the way that was the "old you that managed that wall that finally broke where you now have PTSD".

You have to take on a new overall way of "self care" during this "trauma work and therapy" and as you do so, you will start to have these "beating self up" days slowly reduce more and more.

Everyone has these "beat yourself up moments", however, when someone has PTSD, all the emotional challenges, whatever the emotion is becomes "magnified".
It is like "any other injury" we experience, when we experience an alarm that tells us to go easy because something has been injured and needs time and care to heal.

It is always important to remember, that "new skills" have to be used and the only way a person can actually "achieve" any new skill is by "practicing it over and over" until this skill becomes more and more engrained where like tying our shoe laces, we do it without even giving it much thought.

(((Patience, lots of Patience)))

OE